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Therein flutter the souls of the dead; for the dead be many and the living few. The dead do not come back. Never have the dead come back save thou with thy wonder-tales. It is not meet that the dead come back, and should we permit it, great trouble may be our portion." Nam-Bok knew his people well and was aware that the voice of the council was supreme.
The tendency to idolize great men and the tendency to depreciate them arises alike in emotion; but the slanders of disparagement are as truly legends as the wonder-tales of saints and warriors; and anecdotes related of Caesar at patrician dinner-parties at Rome as little deserve attention as the information so freely given upon the habits of modern statesmen in the salons of London and Paris.
Anyhow, you have heard the oldest stories in all the world the fathers and mothers, so to speak, of all the great family of wonder-tales that have delighted and terrified children ever since. There is no more wonderful or interesting story than that which tells how bit by bit the great dark continent of Africa has been explored, and made to yield up its secrets.
It is wholly improbable that an incident so romantic, so appealing to the imagination, in an age when wonder-tales were eagerly welcomed, and which exhibited such tender pity in the breast of a savage maiden, and such paternal clemency in a savage chief, would have been omitted.
Exact history has robbed this story of some of its romance, but it is still one of the noblest wonder-tales of our own or any nation. Monuments and poetry and art must forever perpetuate it, for it is full of spiritual meaning.
I noticed that she chose to accept Miss Caroline's earliest letters about their good fortune with a sort of half-tolerant attention, as an elder listens to the wonder-tales of an imaginative child, or as I had long listened to Clem's own dreamy-eyed recital of the profits already his from "brillions" of chickens not yet come even to the egg-stage of their careers.
It is wholly improbable that an incident so romantic, so appealing to the imagination, in an age when wonder-tales were eagerly welcomed, and which exhibited such tender pity in the breast of a savage maiden, and such paternal clemency in a savage chief, would have been omitted.
The little brown boys and girls who lived in Egypt three thousand years ago were just as fond as you are of hearing wonderful stories that begin with "Once upon a time;" and I want in this chapter to tell you some of the tales that Tahuti and Sen-senb used to listen to in the evening when school was over and play was done the oldest of all wonder-tales, stories that were old and had long been forgotten, ages before The Sleeping Beauty and Jack and the Beanstalk were first thought of.
He satisfied himself that his Ainos were not making believe, like Europeans with nursery tales, but that the explanatory myths of natural phenomena are to them theorems of physical science, and the wonder-tales are told under the impression that they really happened.
Then, in the late fifties, he joined a mad stampede to the Frazer River gold-fields in British Columbia, still wild over its first knowledge of silver sulphurets, he was drawn back by the wonder-tales of the Comstock lode. Joining the bedraggled caravan over the Carson trail, he continued his course of bitter hardship in the Washoe Valley.
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